


Soul Strings

by Mertiya



Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-08-15 21:44:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8073808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: The fandom-obligatory soulmate AU.  In which Nissa is confused, Jace Beleren is devastated, and Ral Zarek is miffed at a lack of originality.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I just realized no one had written a soulmate AU for the fandom, so--well--here it is.

                  You aren’t supposed to have nightmares about your soul-words. Not that ‘supposed to’ has ever stopped Jace Beleren from having nightmares before, he thinks bitterly, after the third night in a row that he wakes up screaming. Heaving himself out of the tiny little Ravnican cot, he grabs for the glass of water by his bed and tries not to cry, pressing his lips together to muffle the sounds. Trembling, he pulls back the sleeve of his shirt and stares again at the blue words, now hard to make out beneath the three ragged, oozing gashes he’d cut in his arm earlier that day, trying to get _last_ night’s dreams out of his head. _And you’re Beleren, the mysterious mind mage._

                  He may not remember much of his childhood, but Jace is pretty sure he’s never heard of a horror story in which your soulmate not only didn’t love you, but tried to kill literally everyone you cared about. Once again, his life has succeeded at going above and beyond the usual amounts of shit that anyone really ought to be expected to deal with. He shuts his eyes and tries miserably not to think about the words, _How the hell do you know who we are?_ twining around Liliana’s upper thigh, not to think about how happy he’d been tracing his hands eagerly over them. _It can take years to find your soulmate, if you find them at all_. And he’d found her before he turned twenty.

                  Sometimes, in his darker moments, Jace has imagined his soulmate dying before he found them, or watching them die when they’ve only had a few moments together, like some of the great, tragic love stories he’s read in Emmara’s study. But this—to have her betray him, torture him, kill his best friend—it’s too much. Jace buries his face in his pillow and cries.

~

                  Just one word on Nissa’s left breast, directly over her heart, formed in shaky red letters. _Chandra_. She’s not, by nature, a terribly curious person, but it’s so odd, so unusual, that it would make anyone curious. When she’s first learning to read, she thinks it must be a word she hasn’t learned yet, and she asks first her mother, then, one by one, in increasing frustration, all the rest of the elves of her tribe, what _Chandra_ means, but no one can tell her.

                  It’s no word any of them know, so eventually, Nissa decides, it must be a word from the language of one of the other elven tribes, or maybe—but she hopes not—of one of the humans. It makes her want to explore, draws her onward into the wildest places of the word, all in hopes of finding the person who’ll say, simply, _Chandra_ , and maybe mean _hello_ , or _who are you_ , or perhaps be answering her question about a very unusual species of tree.

                  When she sees Emrakul, when her world turns over in a blaze of unreality, she realizes she might have been searching too close to home.

~

                  “Who’s there?” is a fucking stupid statement to have inscribed on your bicep. So, naturally, as soon as he can, Ral gets it tattooed over. The goblin running the tattoo parlor raises her eyebrows and asks _Are you really sure_ until Ral rolls his eyes at her. As if he’d be able to find his soulmate from that, even if he cared to look. Goddamn unimaginative idiot, whoever they are. If Ral somehow turns out to love them despite that, he doesn’t think it’ll matter if he can’t recognize them from the get-go. Besides, he has more important things to worry about, like losing his funding, or getting eaten by an angry dragon.

~

                  “Who’s there? Reveal yourself!” Jace taps his foot in frustration as the lightning parts to reveal the Izzet storm mage. He and Emmara need to get to the end of the Maze, or all of Ravnica could suffer, but from the insufferable smirk on the other mage’s face, trying to say that isn’t something that’s likely to go over well. “You’re Zarek,” he says. “Our host, and the runner for the Izzet.”

                  “And you are Beleren, the mysterious mind mage, who knew so much about the maze.” The words send an unpleasant shock through Jace, and his hand automatically flies to his wrist, fingers tracing across the ridged, hard scars, but he shakes off the sensation. He _is_ a mind mage, it’s not so odd, perhaps, that two people in his life would use those words when they first meet him. It’s not so odd that Liliana’s words would come back to echo and haunt him, soul-words turned from words to hope to words of despair, twisted and mangled and thrown back at him once again.

                  He and Zarek circle one another, clearly hostile, and in just a few moments more, another one of Jace’s tenuous connections snaps at the lightning mage’s mocking words, “You haven’t told her you’re a planeswalker?”

                  Maybe, Jace thinks bleakly, maybe his soul-words themselves are unlucky, even when they aren’t being spoken by his soulmate.

~

                  Ral does have to wonder, in the quiet moments when he and Jace are working side by side over Project Lightning Bug. He’s never quite managed to drop his habit of taking note when people say, “Who’s there?” It’s actually not as common as he initially expected. Maybe being disgustingly cliché is a uniqueness of its own. And certainly Jace is more tolerable than anybody _else_ Ral has heard say it.

                  But you’d think that Beleren would say something, wouldn’t you? After all, the Maze-running’s kind of a blur, but Ral _knows_ he said something more memorable than “Who’s there” even if he can’t remember it word for word. Something about Jace being a mind mage. So presumably, Jace would say something if the words matched, especially now that they aren’t trying to kill each other anymore. And he doesn’t, he remains quiet.

                  Oh, well, Ral thinks, it would have been nice, but it’s never bothered him that much before. Still, he can’t quite rid his mind of the impression of Jace’s wrist against his fingers.

~

                  The brush of quiet fingers on Chandra’s arm as she dances out of the way of Ob Nixilis’ blow. “Prepare something big,” the elf murmurs to her, and Chandra’s heart nearly bursts out of her chest. She stumbles, and for one very long moment, the noise and rush of battle fades, and all Chandra can do is stare helplessly at the way the elf’s hair (and she doesn’t even know her _name_ yet, that’s gotta be illegal or something, at the very least criminal) blows back in the wind, and the grace of her movements. And then she’s back, and things are exploding, because that’s definitely what Chandra does best, and the demon who thought he could hurt _her_ friends is finally retreating.

                  “Knew you’d come,” Gideon says in satisfaction.

                  She’s distracted long enough to point out that she told him ‘no’, and of course he’s still way too happy with himself despite that.

                  “I’m Nissa,” says the gorgeous elf, and her voice makes Chandra go weak at the knees.

                  “Chandra,” she says, offering a hand, and Nissa goes absolutely still.

~

                  Chandra, Nissa, and Gideon get the story out of Jace when he is really very extremely drunk, a few nights after setting up shop in his office. Nissa is shocked when she sees the inside of Jace’s wrist, the puckered scars where he took a knife to the words, trying to gouge them out. “She didn’t _love_ me, is that even supposed to happen?” Jace asks mournfully, although it comes out more like “shupposhed” due to the frankly ridiculous quantity of Ravnican ale he’s had over the course of their evening in. Chandra’s had a few drinks as well, and thus far isn’t showing any signs of serious impairment, but Nissa’s keeping an eye on her because Chandra can go from “everything is fine” to “burning down a city block” in a matter of heartbeats.

                  “I’ve heard of really shitty people being soulmates, but they’re usually soulmates with really shitty other people,” Chandra says with a shrug. “But I guess it could happen, right? No one seems to know much about this stuff.”

                  “I’m the unluckiest person in the Multiverse,” Jace groans, burying his face in his hands. Chandra mutters something about, “damn weepy drunks,” and Nissa shoves her, though not too hard. “The second time I heard someone say this—” Jace continues, thrusting his arm out as though the words weren’t all-but-impossible to read, “—I lost Emmara, right? It’s like—it’s like they’re a curse, not soul-words at all.”

                  Gideon asks, “Are you sure Liliana is your soulmate?” and Jace looks up with a bleary question in his eyes.

~

                  He doesn’t want to ask. Doesn’t want the tiny flame of hope in his chest to go out, and, frankly, he doesn’t want to talk to her if he doesn’t have to, especially about this. But she’s the only one who knows, and she’s the only one who might give him the truth. And if she doesn’t—well, she doesn’t have Bolas’s protection anymore, there’s a not-insignificant chance he can just rip it out of her head. Jace is in no mood to be kind. Not about this, the smudged words, almost unrecognizable beneath the scarring, that might not be hers at all.

                  It takes him a week to get up the courage, but he does. “Liliana,” he says, “whose words do you have?”

                  “I’m surprised you never asked sooner,” Liliana replies with a thin smile. “Tell me, Jace, did you really think we were soulmates?”

                  The words pound home, hard and sharp. They ought to hurt, but they don’t; a crackling storm is suddenly surging up in the back of Jace’s head. “What did you do?” he asks quietly.

                  “It wasn’t that difficult to find someone who’d seen you with your shirt sleeves rolled up, Jace,” she says dismissively. “Not that hard to find an appropriate place to interject it into conversation, either.”

                  “You _stole_ my soul-words?” It’s unbelievable, almost more unbelievable than the idea that he is cursed, that the words that bloomed on his skin before he could even remember are some kind of randomly malignant entity. “You made me think—”

                  “Oh, Jace, I don’t want to hear it.” Liliana sighs wearily. “Did you really think someone who had sold her soul could have a _soulmate_?”

                  “But what about—on your thigh—”

                  “I got a tattoo after we met. Not difficult.”

                  He looks into her mind; her thoughts match her words. Along with them, a dark, yawning bitterness, and a reverberation of the pain he felt when he scratched his soul-words out. The demons flayed her, quite literally. In place of her old skin, the new one, young and vibrant, but covered in crawling purpling runemarks.

                  Not wanting to feel sorry for her, Jace leaves, but he can’t shove away the last dark, nauseous thought, which she probably shoved at him on purpose for that reason, _I don’t even remember what they said_.

~

                  “Ral, can I talk to you?”

                  “Make it fast, Guildpact, the Firemind wants these results by the end of the day.”

When Ral opens the door to his lab, it is to find a very restless-looking mind mage with dark circles standing out beneath his eyes. Sighing, Ral shoves his own half-finished cup of coffee into Jace’s hands. “Did you sleep at all last night?”

                  “Not a wink,” Jace confesses, but he sounds surprisingly cheerful. “Do you remember what the first thing I said to you was?”

                  “ ‘Who’s there’ because you are an unimaginative prick,” Ral supplies, maybe a little too quickly.

                  His friend takes a deep breath. “So I need to tell you about how, when I was nineteen, someone pretended to be my soulmate,” he says softly, and then he holds out his arm. He’s trembling a little. So, Ral notes, as he reaches out to take it, is he. A few sparks spill over his vision, and he brushes them away with his free hand, before turning Jace’s wrist over.

                  The words, deep blue with a subtle tint of red, are almost illegible, hidden beneath three wobbly parallel scars, and Ral has to drop Jace’s hand and turn the dial up on his gauntlet immediately. “Who—” he says hoarsely, because even crossed out, he knows what it should’ve said.

                  “Doesn’t matter,” Jace says shortly, and then he says, “I don’t care,” and then he grabs the back of Ral’s neck and pulls him down into a kiss.

                  “Seriously,” Ral grumbles, breaking away for a moment. “You couldn’t have made this a little easier for me?”

                  “I know you like a challenge,” Jace smirks, and Ral kisses him again.


End file.
